He'd gotten good at hearing the shape of them. Which ones were for the person apologizing and which ones were for him. This one was for him. You should have told me, he said. I know.
If you'd told me, I would have taken the job anyway, he said. And I would have walked into it with better footing. A silence. I know that, too, she said. Now, the eucalyptus stilled for a moment, then started again.
Okay, he said. 72 hours from when Hartwell files. Yes, I'll be in the LA office Wednesday morning. I want to walk through what Fitch does when he gets the advance notice. Specifically, does he have access to any of the bid documentation directly or does he have to go through your ex to see it through my ex?
She said he's not an employee. He has no direct system access. Good. Marcus said that's a choke point. We can work with that a beat.
Then Diane said in a register slightly different from her operational one. Thank you for not I know. He said I was going to say for not making me explain it twice. Oh, he said that too. He heard something at the other end of the line that wasn't quite a laugh and wasn't quite not one.
Then she was back to her operational register because she was Diane Callaway and that was the architecture she worked inside. Wednesday, she said. Wednesday, he said. He hung up. Sat in the side office with the eucalyptus moving outside the window.
He was not okay with having been the trip wire. He was also not going anywhere. Both of those things were true in equal measure. And he'd learned in Phoenix learned it the hard way. The way that costs you something you don't get back that when two true things pulled in opposite directions, you didn't resolve the tension by abandoning one.
You found the structure that could hold them both upright at the same time. He was working on that structure. He had Wednesday to work on it more. He pulled up the bid documents and got back to it. The outside council Diane had retained was a woman named Hartwell, who arrived at the Wednesday meeting 20 minutes early and spent those 20 minutes reading Marcus' documentation with the focused pleasure of someone who genuinely enjoyed a situation with multiple overlapping complications.
She had a legal pad, a specific brand of blue pen, and the manner of someone who had been in rooms like this before and found them energizing rather than draining. Walk me through the Pacific Ridge disqualification," she said to Marcus when Diane had finished introductions. He walked her through it. She asked four questions. He answered all four without hedging.
She wrote something down. "The recorded call," she said. His questions about Pacific Ridge. On that call, he references specific project parameters in a way that implies knowledge he shouldn't have if his involvement is what you're asserting. Yes, that's your strongest single piece.